1) Listen to the basics of the language until it becomes automatic. When I first started, I listened to the pronunciations of the pinyin and tones a million times, in the car, at home, when I had insomnia. Listen to it as many times as it takes until you know how every possible pinyin pronunciation.

2) Find good starter’s materials. Some people have recommended Pimsueler (perhaps someone could recommend other starter’s material?) Be sure that the material focuses on listening and speaking. It would also be ideal if it focused on practical dialogues.

3) Learn the radicals. Almost 90% of characters are composed of a radical along with a pronunciation component. The radical tells you something about the meaning of the character (is it a metal?, does it refers to something you do with your hand?, does it refers to water?, does it refer to a dragon?…etc) The pronunciation part gives you a rough idea about how the word sounds. For example, look at the following characters and see if you can tell which part they have in common. 饱, 抱, 刨, 跑, 炮. Well, it’s the 包 part. As the pronunciation component 包 tells you that it is pronounced either “bao” or “pao”. You’ll notice that the initial consonant has sometimes changed, which is due to the long evolution of the spoken language. The non-包 parts in the above example are the radicals, which give you info as to what the character is about. The first one, for example, is 饱 (bao3, to be full) Thus, the common question, “你吃饱了, 没?” Are you full? In this case, the radical tells you that this “bao” refers to food.

In any case, there are a lot of radicals. You probably don’t need to memorize all of them at the start, but I’d memorize the 30 or 40 most important ones. Then on a Friday night, while your friends are all going out on the town to party and find some sweet ladies or handsome fellas, be a geek and sit at home and spend a few hours practicing looking up unknown characters in the dictionary by identifying the radical. After a few months of practice looking up unknown characters you’ll become good at knowing which part of a character is the radical and which part refers to pronunciation.

4) Visit free websites.

5) Label things in your apartment. Before I came to China I labeled all the things in my apartment with the Chinese characters, pinyin and tones. So every time I went out the door, I could look at that object and see 门口 (men2kou3, door). I don’t think my roommate was all that happy about this though. This, by the way, can also be a conversation starter. Back when I was in Boulder, Colorado I met a Beijinger. I showed him my keys that I had labeled 钥匙 (yao4shi). He was quite shocked, but my keys worked as a good thing for striking up conversations.

6) Enroll in a class or find a teacher. Obviously, an experienced native speaker is an invaluable resource. Like others have said, it’s good to find a teacher that will honestly correct your pronunciation and give you encouragement.

7) Find good learning materials. I’m sure lots of people can suggest things. After two or three months I used “Rapid Literacy in Chinese”, which I highly recommend.

8 ) If you are in China, buy a small notebook to write down new stuff. When I first came to China, I brought my small notebook with me wherever I went. When I saw a new character or learned a new word, I’d write it down. One of my first meals in China was a bowl of hot soup, with vegetables, noodles and a ton of fiery spice. I asked the people what it was called. I mistakenly wrote down malatan, because that is how I heard it. Later I found out it was 麻辣汤 (ma2la4tang1). However, when people saw my book, they generally laughed their asses off, and pointed out all of my mistakes. In other words, my poorly written book served as a conversation piece and I had many Chinese people teaching me for free.

9) Buy music on DVD’s and CD’s. When I first arrived I went to the store to buy a bunch of CD’s, in order to try to find the Chinese Radiohead or Pink Floydd. However, I ended up buying VCD’s, which are kind of like poor quality DVDs. This turned out to be a wonderful blessing in disguise because I was able to listen to the lyrics of the songs while reading the characters. Anybody who has unfortunately heard the Macarena knows that music can easily get stuck in your head, whether you want it there or not. Chinese words from my Wang Fei’s VCD were stuck in my head, and because I saw the characters go by karaoke style dozens of times, I learned many characters fairly painlessly.

10) Make flash cards. On one side write the character, on the other the pinyin and English. Chinese words are usually comprised of two characters. For example, if you plan on not dying, you should probably learn the word 水 (shui3, water). The word “hand” is 手 (shou3). You can combine these to make 水手, “water hand” means “sailor”. So, in order not to forget水, learn it in another context. You’ll probably want to buy a bottle of water, which is 一瓶水. If you’ve learned a bit of Chinese history, you might have heard of the Taiping Rebellion, a wacky rebellion against the Qing Empire led by some David Koresh-types. Anyway, the “ping” of Taiping is 平, which roughly means “peace”, “fair” or “level”. When combined with 水, it becomes水平, or level (as in, “My Yiddish level sucks”).

The point is, for every new character I learned, I tried to memorize it in two different contexts. This increased my chances of remembering it. Also, learn the characters for the Chinese words you already know. For example, Beijing is the so-called “North Capital” 北京. 南京 Nanjing is the “South Capital”. Clearly, 京 means capital. Similarly, 北方 (Bei3fang1) means northern part, or northern part of China, while 南方 (nan2fang1) means southern part, or southern part of China. But you’d better learn 方 in at least one more context, so learn 地方 （di4fang1, place）, with 地 meaning “ground”.